Information Retrieval Gupf

A tweet by @akumar prompted me to punch up this quick blogpost:
as with all controversial issues, there’s a positive in google trying bing/image – that they’re not afraid to learn from competition
What Amit is referring to is the recent addition of gorgeous photographic images as search page background.  See for example this writeup: http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2010/06/google-vs-bing-copycat-picture-on-prominent-page.html
He is [...]

I would like to quickly follow up on my previous post on explicitly collaborative information seeking.  My claim in that post was that, despite the shared terminology, a service like Aardvark (or Twitter) is not truly collaborative.
Let me be clear about Aardvark: What that service does is help you comb through a network of [...]

On Twitter today, Josh Young made an interesting observation to which I would like to call attention:
Ya, @jerepick, with “fauxpen” attached, google’s “nav. search as the top of the stack” is a fragile local maximum for the web.
This observation is a followup to the web-wide discussion that Google kicked off about the meaning of open.  [...]

There is a fantastic Google blog post today by Jonathan Rosenberg on the meaning (and value) of openness.  Whooo-boy.. where do we start with this can of worms?  Guess I’ll jump right in.  Warning: This is probably the longest post I’ve written, so if you are easily bored, understand that this is not required reading.  [...]

Chris Dixon has a post yesterday about search and the social graph.  An interesting read, but what struck me the most was a tangent about how current search engines make money:
Lost amid this discussion, however, is that the links people tend to share on social networks – news, blog posts, videos – are in categories [...]

Via Greg Linden, I came across this interesting quote from Eric Schmidt about the obligation to help newspapers succeed:
Finally, Eric claimed Google has a moral duty to help newspapers succeed:
Google sees itself as trying to make the world a better place. And our values are that more information is positive — transparency. And the [...]

What sort of information retrieval system would you build if you knew that all the users of your system would be expert or highly-motivated amateur searchers?  What sort of system would you build when you have a very large collection of unstructured information, and the goal in searching that information is not to find one [...]

A few days ago I posted a question about why modern web retrieval systems offer no explicit relevance feedback mechanisms.  I wonder if it has anything to do with the following attitude, explained by one of my favorite bloggers, Nick Carr:
The problem with the Web, as I see it, is that it imposes, with its [...]

“The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine” is the title of a new Wired article.  In it, Robert Capps makes the following point:
The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. [...]

If it wasn’t official before, it is now.  Google self-advertises:
In the latest shot fired in Google Inc.’s ongoing battle with Microsoft Corp., Google announced today that it’s taking this fight to the streets.
Literally.
Google is kicking off a month-long ad campaign for its online suite of enterprise office applications. The campaign will have the search giant [...]